Saturday, August 30, 2008

In 2007 Henrik Schrat was awarded a UNESCO Aschberg grant, and he took up a residency at Sanskriti Kendra in Delhi, India.
During his stay in India, he was interested in the role, which crafts play for the cultural self understanding in India.
The piece is called 'Oursurcing', and is a picture story about an artist, coming to India, and looking for an artisan to cooperate with… He searched for artisans producing wood inlay pictures. They are traditionally located in the town called Mysore, in South India, some 120 km away from Bangalore. Artisans usually don't speak English, and so it became a quite complicated process to find partners. In the end two workshops started to produce pictures with him, and a first small series of works developed. Those artisans have done wood inlay pictures for generations, they use nine different materials.
The self reflexive piece consists of 1 large and 20 small images, and a large number of words and word groups, surrounding and characterising the story